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Tuesday, January 31, 2017

HandBrake is a free and open-source video transcoder, originally
developed in 2003 by Eric Petit (aka "titer" from his SVN repository
username) to make ripping a film from a DVD to a data storage device
easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions.
HandBrake is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It uses third-party libraries such as Libav, libvpx, and x265.

Audacious is an open source audio player. A descendant of XMMS,
Audacious plays your music how you want it, without stealing away your
computer’s resources from other tasks. Drag and drop folders and
individual song files, search for artists and albums in your entire
music library, or create and edit your own custom playlists. Listen to
CD’s or stream music from the Internet.

Audacious 3.8 changelog :

This is a very small release with fixes for bug some .m4a files are played the error

Neofetch is a CLI system information tool written in BASH. Neofetch displays information about your system next to an image, your OS logo, or any ascii file of your choice. The main purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screenshots to show other users what OS/Distro you're running, what Theme/Icons you're using and etc.

Neofetch is highly customizable through the use of commandline flags or the user config file. There are over 50 config options to mess around with and there's the print_info() function and friends which let you add your own custom info.

The latest development version of GIMP features a new revamped UI and usability changes. Several new themes by Benoit Touchette has been included in various shades of gray: Lighter, Light, Gray, Dark, Darker. The system theme has been preserved for users who prefer a completely consistent look of user interfaces across all desktop applications. The new UI themes are accompanied by symbolic icons.

GIMP now keeps track of all GEGL-based filters that you used within one session and allows re-running them via the Filters > Recently Used submenu, just like old GIMP plug-ins. The new MyPaint Brush tool is now enabled by default.

Wine 2.0 is the first release made on the new time-based, annual release schedule. This implies that some features that are being worked on but couldn't be finished in time have been deferred to the next development cycle. This includes in particular the Direct3D command stream, the full HID support, the Android graphics driver, and message-mode pipes.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

MKVtoolnix is a set of tools to create, alter, split, join and inspect
Matroska files(mkv). With these tools one can get information about
(mkvinfo) Matroska files, extract tracks/data from (mkvextract) Matroska
files and create (mkvmerge) Matroska files from other media files.
Matroska is a multimedia file format aiming to become THE new container
format for the future. Use MKVCleaver or gMKVExtractGUI to
extract/demultiplex mkv video and audio files.

MKVToolNix 9.8.0 changelog

mkvmerge: VobSub in Matroska: mkvmerge will now create and use a default index for VobSub tracks read from Matroska files that are missing their CodecPrivate element (which normally contains said index).

GUI: added checks for several common problems with the installation. These checks will be executed when the GUI starts, and any problems will be reported to the user.

SMPlayer is a free media player for Windows and Linux with built-in
codecs that can play virtually all video and audio formats. It doesn't
need any external codecs. Just install SMPlayer and you'll be able to
play all formats without the hassle to find and install codec packs.

One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer: it remembers the
settings of all files you play. So you start to watch a movie but you
have to leave... don't worry, when you open that movie again it will be
resumed at the same point you left it, and with the same settings: audio
track, subtitles, volume... SMPlayer is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the award-winning MPlayer,
which is capable of playing almost all known video and audio formats.
But apart from providing access for the most common and useful options
of MPlayer, SMPlayer adds other interesting features like the
possibility to play Youtube videos or download subtitles.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

VidCutter is a new open source video editor that does video trimming and merging, that’s all. Since it doesn’t provide advanced features, it is fairly simple to use and that’s what makes it more useful for simple editing tasks of splitting or joining videos.

VidCutter video editor features

VidCutter is a cross-platform video editor based on QT5. It uses FFmpeg for the backend. If I have to list the features, it would be:

Storybook is an open source software for writers, essayists, authors. Used from the draft to the final work, with oStorybook you can never lose the history of the field of view. oStorybook helps you to maintain control over the various developments of your story.

Except for the usual schedule, version 5.00.02 is available. The version of December 2016 presented some serious anomalies which justified this publication of urgency.

Besides the correction of the anomalies, you will find the usual procession of new functions:

The Inkscape project announces a new version 0.92 of its popular vector drawing software. New features include mesh gradients, improved SVG2 and CSS3 support, new path effects, interactive smoothing for the pencil tool, a new Object dialog for directly managing all drawing elements, and much more. Infrastructural changes are also under way, including a switch to CMake from the venerable Autotools build system.

Inkscape 0.92 highlights

Mesh Gradients are now supported.

Many SVG2 and CSS3 properties are now supported (e.g. paint-order, mix-blend-mode). Not all are available from the GUI.

The new Object dialog allows to select, label, hide and lock any object in the drawing from a dialog that lists them all

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Y PPA Manager, as the name implies, is a tool for managing PPA (repositories): add, delete, cleaning PPA, finding packages in Launchpad PPA, the list of packages in Ubuntu and more. All this from a single user interface.

Thunderbird 45.6.0 is an open-source e-mail client and chat client
developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses,
newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing
multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its
power can be extended by plugins.

Fixed:

The system integration dialog was shown every time when starting Thunderbird

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Following the 4th release 5.3.0 published in November 2016, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.4.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces several improvements to the similarity search engine and a complete re-write of video file support.

digiKam 5.4.0 Changelog:

Usability improvements to the fuzzy sidebar functionality

Duplicates search improvement

Possibility to drag and drop an image into the Fuzzy search without import it.

gLabels is a GNU/Linux program for creating labels and business cards. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you’ll find at most office supply stores. gLabels is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Pixelitor is a free and open source image editing software that supports layers, layer masks, text layers, filters, multiple undo etc. It requires Java 8 (the browser plugin is not needed). As of 4.0.2, it has more than 80 image filters and color adjustments, some of which are unique to Pixelitor. Some of the gradients can also be found only here.

jNetMap will ping all registered devices every x minutes, updating it's status according to the result of the ping. Alternatively you can also monitor a specific port, such as port 80 for webservers. Available devices are green, unavailable devices are red. Gray means "unknown" and orange "not found".

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Wavemon is a wireless device monitoring application that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware. It should work (though with varying features) with all devices supported by the Linux kernel.

Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use
hardware and software. Arduino boards are able to read inputs - light on
a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message - and turn it into
an output - activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something
online. You can tell your board what to do by sending a set of
instructions to the microcontroller on the board.

Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player written in Python, using the
Mutagen tagging library. It’s designed around the idea that you know how
to organize your music better than we do. It lets you make playlists
based on regular expressions (don’t worry, regular searches work too).
It lets you display and edit any tags you want in the file, for all the
file formats it supports.

The latest version available is QuodLibet 3.8.0, which has been recently released, bringing a huge list of changes:

concurrent.futures required (usually called python-futures, python-concurrent.futures or python2-futures in distros)

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

announce the first bugfix release for the 2.2 series of darktable, 2.2.1

Darktable 2.2.1 Changelog:New features:

Show a dialog window that tells when locking the database/library failed

Thursday, January 5, 2017

Fotoxx is a free Linux program for editing photos or other images
and managing a large collection. Image directories (folders) can be
viewed as a scrolling gallery of thumbnail images. Navigating
directories and subdirectories is simple and fast. Click on a thumbnail
for a full window view of the image. The image can be zoomed, panned and
scrolled using the mouse. Gallery thumbnails can vary from small to
huge. Popup windows can be used to view multiple images at any scale.
Galleries are also used to display image search results and albums.

Fotoxx 16.11.1 Changelog:

Show the entire image directory hierarchy with [+] and [-] buttons to expand or contract subdirectories at each level. Click any entry for a gallery view.

Blend Image: Paint with the mouse to blend pixels within the mouse circle.

Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor for
Windows, Mac and Linux. Major features include support for a wide range
of formats; no import required meaning native timeline editing;
Blackmagic Design support for input and preview monitoring; and
resolution support to 4k.

Shotcut 17.01.02 Changelog:

This version is just bug fixes plus a Chinese translation for Taiwan was added.

Aria Maestosa is an open-source (GPL) midi sequencer/editor. It lets you compose, edit and play midi files with a few clicks in a user-friendly interface offering score, keyboard, guitar, drum and controller views.

Aria Maestosa runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux/Unix. It is translated in many languages including French, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Russian.

Speedtest-cli is a script written in the Python programming language which measures the internet speed bidirectionally. This application allows you to check your internet speed upon distance in km, it can test against specific servers and it also provides a URL so that you can share your result on the internet.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Android app development, based on IntelliJ IDEA . On top of IntelliJ's powerful code editor and developer tools, Android Studio offers even more features that enhance your productivity when building Android apps

Android Studio 2.2.3 changelog:

ProGuard version rollback. Due to a correctness issue discovered in ProGuard 5.3.1, we have rolled back to ProGuard 5.2.1. We have worked with the ProGuard team on getting a fix quickly, and we expect to roll forward to ProGuard 5.3.2 in Android Studio 2.3 Canary 3.

Master PDF editor is a complete solution for viewing, printing and editing PDF files. It’s developed by Code Industry Ltd and available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Master PDF Editor 4.0 is based on version 3.x. New release of the established PDF editor has all the best of what was implemented for earlier versions, but with lots of bug-fixes, new features and tools.

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting,
filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including
AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.
Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting
capabilities.

Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.Avidemux 2.6.15 changelog

DVDStyler 3.0.3 Authoring Tool released is a cross-platform free DVD
authoring application for the creation of professional-looking DVDs. It
allows not only burning of video files on DVD that can be played
practically on any standalone DVD player, but also creation of
individually designed DVD menus. It is Open Source Software and is
completely free.

Features

create and burn DVD video with interactive menus

design your own DVD menu or select one from the list of ready to use menu templates